Repeats on the television, repeats in real life. Playing now on the American politics channel is the old Springsteen/Trump bout. Over here, GB Spews is dusting off old episodes of It Ain’t Half Brexit Mum.

Trump-bashing from Springsteen? Oh, I can take as much as the Boss wishes to dish out. The Maga minions are not happy, though, tutting and muttering beneath their silly red caps.

That’s not to mention the reaction from Trump himself.

As Springsteen began the latest leg of his tour with the E Street Band, he took to the stage early in Manchester and made a speech saying the US was “currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration”.

He also referenced the “very weird, strange and dangerous shit” happening in America before condemning Trump for “persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent”.

To which Bruce might also have added that Trump was hollowing out the US state to his own advantage, destroying higher education and health care, all while apparently regarding the presidency as a giant cash machine.

Trump had an orange meltdown on his Truth Social platform where in the small hours he conducts myriad petty vendettas. He said Springsteen was “dumb as a rock” – quite something from a man who makes boulders look intellectual.

Trump also said Springsteen was a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker”.

His own skin could be as prune-like as anything and no one would be any wiser, thanks to that tangerine tan.

From horrid glimpse, while summoning TS Eliot’s line about “the skull beneath the skin”, the skin beneath the faux tan is emulsion white.

Music aside – and I do love a bit of Bruce – Springsteen looks to be in enviably good nick, whereas Trump suggests a shambling tower made of too many burgers.

How unseemly that Trump should be carrying on so when 80 is on the horizon. And take that from a man who can see 70 just over the next hill.

All power to Bruce. Sing that message out loud. Too few Americans have your platform or dare raise their voice.

And those voices need raising. At the time of typing, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has just moved to revoke Harvard University’s ability to enrol international students – ramping up his attempt to control/destroy the country’s top universities.

Now let’s change channels.

Whatever you think of Keir Starmer – and his ‘island of strangers’ remark was a new low – he does have a certain stubborn pragmatism and sticks at what he wants to achieve.

Starmer’s new EU deal is another bit of pragmatism. Nothing flashy, nothing remarkable. Just a sensible acknowledgement that we should have a stronger relationship with our nearest neighbours.

The political fallout was predictable. The Tories called the modest deal a Brexit ‘surrender’, Reform UK’s new MP Sarah Pochin said it was a ‘complete betrayal of Brexit’, while Boris Johnson, well, Boris Johnson blathered something interminably stupid. Much of the confected anger concerned the fishing deal – an exact copy of the one Johnson struck.

The new deal isn’t any sort of a betrayal. Brexit itself was a betrayal of good sense, and a monumentally pointless act of self-harm.

The members of that ranting chorus will never forgive or forget. Let’s leave them to their sour grumbles and get on with ordering life sensibly.

And the generator of grievance politics, the man who pursued Brexit so noisily and nastily, where was he when the deal was discussed in Parliament? Nigel Farage MP was on holiday in France. Nothing so piddling for him as taking part in a debate concerned what he has spent half his life banging on about.

Nigel Farage in the Daily Mail…

How do you deal with a problem like Nigel Farage? Not by being more Nigel, for starters.

A lesson lost on Keir Starmer, whose plans to curb net migration announced yesterday caused anguish among some MPs. Did he really have to say that the UK risked becoming an “an island of strangers” without tough new immigration policies?

A sorry scrap of rhetoric too close to something Enoch Powell might have spat out. Labour’s plans are more thoughtful than that. But still – you don’t beat Nigel by being more Nigel.

Personally, I think we all need to be a lot less Nigel.

If I see one more photograph of Farage with his mouth agape in a manic grin – count those fillings; map out those tobacco tidemarks; spy the remains of those long lunches – it will finish me off.

Political commentators of assorted shades are highly excited by the rise of Reform UK, the latest of Farage’s self-made political parties. By the way, I prefer Reform Yuck, as that seems more fitting. Puerile, perhaps. But really – this is a ‘party for the people’ run by ex-public schoolboy millionaires. So, yes, yuck.

Success in the English local elections, one mayoral victory and a paper-thin by-election win in Runcorn are being flourished as stone-carved proof that Farage will be the next prime minister. Mostly by a certain Mr N Farage, whose nuclear self-belief has never been in short supply. Yet beneath that cawl of confidence hides a thin-skinned man who brooks nether disagreement nor questions.

The very idea that such a terrible man could be prime minister falls a mountain short of decency. Of it does if you ask me. The trouble is, I swore voters in the US wouldn’t be stupid enough to give the orange-hued would-be dictator Donald Trump another turn. And we all know how that worked out.

It is still possible everything might fall apart for Farage. This master of the dark arts of self-promotion remains more of a political entertainer than a true politician, a song-and-dance man who hums a hateful tune.

True politics is a slog; it’s boring and takes effort. Farage is far more interested in counting his following on TikTok. That, by the way, is impressive but will it last and will it translate into votes at a long-distant election?

Let’s hope not.

Farage is an expert at setting the political mood – or, perhaps more tellingly, at fouling the political mood. His is the politics of grievance. He has to be against something: the EU, Net Zero policies, cycle lanes, you name it, Nigel will hate it.

What else do Nigel and Reform Yuck wish to do? Oh, only to ‘remoralise’ young people and force them to be patriotic, and if that doesn’t sound sinister to you, your filters could do with a service. Oh, they also want to erect statues to great British figures, and to end “all this woke nonsense”.

How very yawn.

For now, Reform benefits from disillusionment with the main parties. The Tories will take a long time to recover from their electoral drubbing last year; and Labour may well take as long to recover from the weight of their unexpected victory.

Also, Reform Yuck find strength in not being any of the above. Now that they are running some councils, people may well conclude in the end that they’re no better than all the above.

Anyone wishing to know what else Farage would do if he became prime minister may find enlightenment in a ‘manifesto’ cum advertising feature published in the Daily Mail.

The list of his desires included pledges to scrap inheritance tax on estates under £2 million, ditching net zero targets, dropping income tax for those earning under £20,000, fixing the NHS, and bringing back fracking.

Exactly how you fix the NHS while throwing away billions in income tax remains a mystery.

I wonder what the Economist makes of these plans. “Reform’s policies add up to an agenda of fiscal recklessness that rivals, and may well exceed, the disastrous 49-day, hair-raising, market-tanking premiership of Liz Truss in 2022,” the magazine said.

It also estimated that a Reform UK government would cost the economy around £200 billion while only saving £100 billion, creating a “colossal fiscal shock”.

Let’s end with letter in The Times, from Peter Dorey, of Bath. This has been much shared on social media and for good reason…

“I am intrigued that Nigel Farage wants schools to teach British values to remoralise young people. To me, British values include empathy, fairness, honesty, mutual tolerance, open-mindedness, promotion of national unity over divide and rule, and respect for experts and institutions. I do not discern any of these values in Mr Farage.”

I can’t think of anything better to add and will end there.

The similarities between myself and George Clooney have long been apparent, so long as you overlook my lack of hair and his silver sheen of handsomeness.

Similarly, the parallels between Mrs Clooney and my wife have long been apparent, apart from a few differences that are hardly worth mentioning.

Amal Clooney is also an international human rights barrister. The last time I checked, my wife isn’t one of those.

At the time of writing, she has just messaged to say her bus is stuck in traffic. That’s my wife and not the other Mrs C. Amal might catch a bus sometimes, but if she does it’s not something you hear much about.

Still, here we are, the pair of us, so easily confused with George and Amal, however unlikely that may seem. George is a Hollywood actor who makes women swoon. While it is a truth universally acknowledged that I am a retired journalist who made one woman swoon once long ago.

For some reason, my wife isn’t photographed wherever she goes, unlike Amal, who belongs to the secular royalty loved by newspapers. Snap, snap – there she goes.

Thanks to her work, Amal has also annoyed Donald Trump, so bully for her. She could be barred from entering the US by the Tango Man after a panel she sat on recommended an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, on war crimes charges in Gaza.

Meanwhile, that bus my wife sat on has now crawled its way to the station.

Pardon the preamble, but that’s the way the words roll some days.

Here is the point of all this meandering.

The similarity between us is that we don’t argue. This is not to say that I don’t argue with Clooney or his wife, as I’ve never met them. It’s that I don’t argue with my wife, who I have met many times.

We have been married for 38 years, together for 40 or so. And we don’t argue. While my doppelganger George Clooney last week told a US morning TV show that he and Amal, who have been married for 12 years, have not had one argument.

“Is George Clooney right not to argue?” asked the headline above a report in the Guardian.

That depends on your views about rows.

Stefan Walters, a therapist quoted in the article, said: “Actually, arguing is a great skill for couples. Couples who argue actually end up staying together much more than couples who don’t.”

I’d argue that there is a man who says ‘actually’ more often than is strictly necessary, but there you go.

I asked a friend at badminton, who is in his eighties, for his views on marital quarrels. He said arguments had sustained him and his wife through more than 60 years of marriage.

They didn’t have huge arguments, he said, just one of them telling the other they hadn’t done what they were supposed to have done. By his telling, he was usually the one being ticked off, but they always made up.

With us there have been sulks and silences, although too few to mention. I guess I have the verbal fluency to argue, but not the inclination. My wife says she would probably cry if we did argue.

Someone I know used to argue with his wife all the time, usually on the phone, sometimes in person. It seemed to suit them, although they argued their way out of that marriage in the end.

We don’t argue and are still married. Our world view is similar, although my wife has a lower tolerance for politics, news and other worrisome things. When fed up with me, if you can imagine such an unlikely occurrence, she might perhaps go into the garden for some angry digging.

She has never yet dug a hole big enough to drop me into, which is encouraging.

America – what are you becoming? I have been to the States twice. The trips were good in different ways, but I won’t be going again, at least not for four years or so.

An easy principle to flourish, making a stance about something you weren’t going to do anyway. But I’d love to return one day, finances and upended geopolitics permitting.

The first trip, featured before on this ledge, was with my university friend John. A week in New York, a seven-day drive of 3,000 miles to Los Angeles, delivering a car, followed by a week in LA and San Francisco.

John died in 1999, aged 42, a departure that cast a shadow familiar to anyone who has lost a friend. The memories now belong only to me as John cannot join in, or heckle or say it wasn’t like that, not on that day, but they are good memories.

If that holiday was a taster course in all things American, the second was a more traditional dish, a family break in Orlando with my wife’s parents and her sister and family, taking in Disney World.

The children, young then, a little less young now, still talk about those days in Florida.

Both holidays left a good impression of America, of places visited and people met. It’s easy to forget just what a great country America was before the Tango gangster set about recasting it in his own misshapen image.

I’d love to return, to hire a camper van and explore the natural wonders and the great cities, the canyons and the galleries, the coasts and the craft breweries.

All those deportations and detentions are putting me off. And I am not alone, as the US travel and tourism industry are likely to miss out on billions of dollars this year.

Why would you now wish to visit a country that confined British tourist Becky Burke, 28, for 19 days and then removed her in chains, “like Hannibal Lecter”, according to her parents?

Becky was arrested half way through a backpacking trip across North America. When released she was, according to parents Paul and Andrea Burke, of Monmouthshire, “traumatised” after being taken in “leg chains, waist chains and handcuffs”.

A quote issued to the BBC illustrates heartless bureaucracy at work. The statement from the Northwest ICE Processing Center ran as follows: “All aliens in violation of US immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States regardless of nationality.”

Becky’s arrest and detention came from what appears to be a misunderstanding of her accommodation arrangements. She had organised free accommodation for helping host families “around the house”.

Helping around the house must clearly be the actions of an “enemy alien” in today’s America. An easy mistake to make once you have whipped up a braying mob.

Sometimes spouting off about strength is a kind of weakness, a bully boy idiocy that foolishly foresees no bad consequences.

Whether you like the States or not, it has great influence on the world, and at present that influence seems only to be for ill. “Make America Great Again” is an inbred, parochial cry for a country once mostly respected in the world.

Off-and-on-again tariffs have put paid to that. As have Trump’s “kiss-my-ass” approach to diplomacy. And his attack on the academic freedoms, and the finances, of America’s great universities.

Why on earth did Sir Keir Starmer invite mad king Donald here for a second state visit? Crawling to Trump will lead nowhere good.

As for trade deals, that will be fine, so long as it doesn’t end up with us having to import chlorinated chicken and other American delights. Coq au Chlorine? Thanks, but no.

If the US is out of bounds for travellers young and old, it is encouraging that the EU appears to be paving the way for British and European 18 to 30-year-olds to travel and work freely. If the US is closing borders, Europe should open theirs.

Young people should travel and explore different cultures, and many young Europeans want to visit Britain. We should invite them here openly and often.

My now dented appreciation of America is partly based on those two trips eons ago. Alongside long being dunked in American culture, from TV and films to music and literature.

Where is Mark Twain when you need him? Long gone but still here in the following quote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”

A while ago I imposed a Trump veto on myself. Trouble is, that man is hard to ignore.

He’s in the room with me now, doing that weird dance like a puppet with poor joints. That’s the juncture between two bones in the body, not the sort you set light to with a match. That man doesn’t need to smoke anything. He’s high on vengeance and empty self-validation. Plus diet drinks and burgers – a contradiction of comestibles, if ever there was.

Anyway, apologies for the lapse back into Trump-world.

He is stepping closer now, a leer curling his mean lip.

“Write about me, you know you want to. Everybody in the world is talking about me. They just can’t help themselves. Write about how I am going to make American showers great again. You know, I do like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair. The water comes out drip, drip, drip. It’s ridiculous. That’s why I signed an executive order about showers.”

The above is true, by the way, although the words have been rearranged. A bit like Trump’s beautiful hair.

How weird the world is now that we should pay attention as an old man boasts about his hair. Has anyone fact-checked that hair? If you ask me, his coiffure seems have been spun from candyfloss, like something he won at the fair.

Does Trump really think his hair is beautiful? Who knows, but he just loves having the world hang on his every word.

Lately he’s been chuntering about tariffs. I do not understand enough about tariffs to issue a retaliatory chunter. But then Trump doesn’t seem to understand tariffs either.

As far as I can see, a tariff is just another tax, but one levied on imports. Trump imposed tariffs on all countries, some inhabited only by penguins, and then took the tariffs off, before swearing they’ll be back.

Trump’s on-off tariffs are, according to the BBC’s economics editor, Faisal Islam, taking the US “back a century in terms of protectionism”.

They’re also scaring the shit out of the financial markets (me, not Faisal).

He’s mainly concerned with hitting China. At the time of bashing this out, Trump says Chinese-made smartphones and other electronics will be exempt from levies on general goods of up to 145%. Until they’re not, as the next day he says they are not exempt but have been moved into a different levy “bucket”, whatever that might be.

Is a levy bucket what he drinks his Diet Coke from? Who knows.

All this wild inconsistency is terrible for the stock markets and the world’s economy. But Trump doesn’t care, being surrounded by bum-kissing officials who praise his every unstable word. When he backs down after saying he wouldn’t back down, there is always a lackey on hand to say that was the plan all along.

Then hand-picked correspondents, having been washed clean of all traces of journalism, ask ridiculous question of his press secretary, saying things such as: “How does President Trump manage to be such a fine figure of a man? He looks so much fitter than he was in his first presidency.”

Oh, yes – the finest pear-shaped old dodderer ever to cheat on a golf course.

The grotesque showmanship, the reality TV sheen, is, sadly, just a distraction so we forget that Trump is reshaping the US in his image, that he is destroying the state to make life even richer for his billionaire pals, that he viciously turns on anyone who doesn’t join the bum-kissing queue and threatens to sue broadcasters he considers lacking in respect.

As the former US news anchor broadcaster Dan Rather points out in his excellent blog, behind the rancour and the racket from Trump, the Republicans have been busy passing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. This will require showing a passport or birth certificate matching one’s legal name to register to vote.

Rather says this Act is “nothing but codified voter suppression. Sponsors and supporters of the bill will tell you it’s about safeguarding our election process. Once again, for those in the back: Our elections are safe.”

Rather adds: “For years, Trump and MAGA have repeated false claims of massive voter fraud. It is a myth used to enrage the base and reduce the number of people who can vote. No one has produced evidence to support these spurious allegations. Note that there was nary a mention of voter fraud when Trump won in 2024.”

How graceless in victory Trump has been. And, for all his mock tough boy swagger, he is really just a bully. Like all bullies, he is a weak man pretending to strength.

What a mess. Next time I promise to find something else to write about.

The idea for this one came at the back with a smell of diesel. Most buses in York whiz around silently. This one was old school.

After dropping the car off at the local garage, I walked a while, then hopped on an unaccustomed number. Never ventured on this route before, but you take your excitement where you find it.

Tourists from a village near Winchester sat next to me. They asked where the bus went and commented on the diesel rattle.

All the buses used to be like this, old and horrid and smelling of a petrol station forecourt. People who bang on about how they hate electric cars should be made to travel only on diesel boneshakers, leaving the rest of us to enjoy the modern age.

Electric cars were the future once, and perhaps they still are, although plenty of people delight in bringing them down. As for the oil companies, they just want us addicted to fossil fuels, like the fossil fools we are.

Those companies are far too powerful, but they love the addled king over the water, who is downgrading everything environmental, although you could just stop that sentence at ‘everything’.

He loves the black stuff, that man, and witters “drill, baby, drill” like a cosplay oilman. Or a demented dentist.

Electric cars are not the future in the US, as he doesn’t like them, even though the billionaire who makes them spent millions of dollars paying for his election. There’s gratitude for you.

Confusingly, he turned the White House into a car lot the other day as a tacky advert for Tesla cars. He even swears he is going to buy one, even though only drives those little electric carts he uses for cheating at golf.

As for me, I have made the principled decision not to buy a Tesla because of Elon ‘Hitler salute’ Musk. This is an easy principle to maintain as I can’t afford one. But you have to make a stand. With enough money I would fancy a Volvo or a VW with a plug.

The bus stopped in a cloud of diesel, and I went off to interview a Polish man who, with his wife, has opened a bakery and bistro in York. People coming over here to make lovely food and brighten our dull lives. It’s almost as if Nigel Farage never existed, which was tragically not the case last time I checked.

Also that morning I bumped into someone from old people’s badminton, then popped into my favourite bookshop to say how much I’d enjoyed the last book from there. Night Waking by Sarah Moss, in case you’re wondering.

Outside the shop the sun was shining, spring was here, but other springs were on my mind.

We’d been with my mother last weekend, driving round and round the tiny lanes in the back of nowhere, or Macclesfield to be precise, while she tried to remember exactly where her friend lived. When we finally arrived, as we got out of the car there was a loud metallic springing noise, an unwelcome echo of that once made by Zebedee on the Magic Roundabout.

It was not encouraging.

The bus back was electric, swift and silent. Wonderful vehicles, apart from when they loom behind you without a warning when you are cycling.

Hopping off, I walked up the hill, then down to the garage, where the mechanic hoisted up the car and pointed to the broken spring. And two knackered shock-absorbers.

The next shock I had to absorb was the cost.

Later, he led me to my revived car. The garage has a carwash and the car being finished off was an electric Audi.

“What’ll happen when we all drive those?” I asked.

“Petrol,” he said. “You need to keep driving petrol.”

I didn’t tell him about my electric dreams.

Just then an unnecessarily modified Ford drove past with one of those loud popping exhausts. Then circled by again, just in case nobody had noticed the first time.

How will fumy young poseurs cope when the petrol runs out?

We’ve always talked about going to the annual Hold Steady gig at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, without doing anything about it.

But now we are here.

I got my eldest boy into this American band years back now. We saw them early on with Counting Crows in Manchester. And now we are here for their Weekender party, a regular date on the Camden calendar.

The venue is one loud, heaving party, all joyous and hectic, sweaty and beery.

As we end up in a lively scrum near the front, I am glad of my son’s presence. This trip was his idea, he did all the organising, and now he has my back.

It doesn’t take much to get this crowd going, and it’s fair to say they are not careful with their beer. Without the support of those around them, the least stable fans would fall over, and some do that anyway, redistributing their drinks as they go down.

It’s surprising just how much the fans adore this band. A fine adoration, for sure, but I had no idea the fans would be so ardent, and so physical, so completely into the Hold Steady. Theirs is a raucous ecstasy, leaping about, flinging their arms, jumping like pneumatic drills, and shouting the lyrics back at Finn.

Standing near the front now seems to have been a little reckless. The mostly blokeish mob surges forward, then falls back, pushing and pressing in a hefty conga line.

“Are you all right, Dad?” says Spencer behind me, as the wave returns.

It’s funny to think of it now, but when he was a toddler he used to hide behind his mother’s legs, or even under her skirts, too shy to be seen. And now he is a man of six foot two and acting as a human prop to his small old dad. Five foot eight, and I’m sticking to that now eroded truth.

I am glad that little boy grew into this man, I think, as the fans surge back again. I helped to look after him, and now he is looking after me in the midst of this happy riot.

The Hold Steady, fronted by Crain Finn for 20 years and more, tell stories of drugs and alcohol, religion and redemption, hope and despair. Often these rock yarns have roots in Minneapolis, where Finn grew up.

Rampaged youth is viewed through a long smudged lens. The songs are rocking, uplifting and yet gentle too, fond and packed with believable characters, all seeming so real.

Finn often sings and speaks about how he only just made in out of that party maze, as in this key lyric: “Killer parties almost killed me.”

A phrase that gave a title to their debut album in 2004. Two years later saw the release of what is considered their greatest album, Boys And Girls In America, and the opening track, Stuck Between Stations, gets the party started tonight.

Finn is, you have to admit, an unlikely rock star, a balding 53-year-old in heavy-framed black spectacles, perhaps a little tubby, looking like someone’s dad on a livelier night out than he intended. Yet as soon as he speaks or sings, the charisma shines out. There is something about this crumpled rock god, an everyday sort of hero.

It is a night of stories and songs, tales and tunes, and some killer chords. This band has survived lots of those, too. Two guest horn players turn six into eight, filling out the sound, and allowing songs such as Sequestered in Memphis to kick up a gear.

Chips Ahoy is another lively treasure. The opening lyrics get everyone going again –

“She put $900 on the fifth horse in the sixth race
I think his name was chips ahoy

Came in six lengths ahead

We spent the whole next week getting high.”

Stay Positive is in there too, one of the band’s sturdy anthems.

“There is so much joy in what we do up here,” says Finn towards the end.

After the last encore, as is traditional with this band, Finn chants: “We are the Hold Steady – you are the Hold Steady…”

This really does feel like a community or the livelier sort of church – even if you wouldn’t want to invite some of the worshippers round to your house after the ‘service’.

Everyone leaves hot and happy, a little battered and bruised, but feeling positive, as instructed.

We go back to our hotel smelling of beer. The next morning, probably still smelling of beer, we walk through Hyde Park in the sunshine, then visit the V&A Museum, before heading back through the park to Speakers’ Corner and Oxford Street, something to eat, a beer, then home.

Finn went with us too, still filling our heads with his killer songs and killer stories. How good it is to have finally made that gig. A glorious night. But next time, if there is one, I will stand further back.

SOME days I go for a run. One slow foot follows the other, my heart seeming steady, almost as if nothing ever went wrong in there.

The other morning I ran into a raggedy throng of young people. It must have been non-uniform day. Blazers had been put aside, trousers or skirts left at home, smart shoes stored wherever teenagers keep their footwear.

The answer long ago to that last matter was in the hall of our house, where trainers were moored like beached dinghies, especially when the boys had their friends round.

Counting the minutes to rest and a mug of tea, I labour on and chuckle to myself that these teenagers had swapped one uniform for another. How amusing. They are free to wear what they wish, and yet they all look exactly the same.

A man of my age cannot be expected to know much about what teenagers wear, but let’s settle for sportswear, tracksuit bottoms and trainers, hoodies and sweatshirts. Same colours, same styles, celebrating their sartorial freedom by being alike.

Those who cycled hung their helmets from their handlebars, in which position the usefulness of this form of head protection can be called into question.

This might make a blog, I thought, while trundling against the tide of youth. What they made of the ageing man sporting headphones atop a hand-knitted hat, his face red, his frown set for the finishing sofa, remains unknown. Probably nothing, as why would they.

Ha, but young people, they’re all the same, aren’t they?

Once cooled off and showered, I sought out my Levi jeans with the bottoms folded over – “I grow old … I grow old …/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”, as the poet TS Eliot put it – to be worn above sensible shoes or the more robust sort of trainers, paired with a checked or striped shirt or a nice woollen jumper, topped with a tweed jacket, all capped off with something flat up top.

Mine is a Peaky Blinders number, that crowning cliché.

I like that hat, those rolled-up jeans, those jumpers and jackets. When I see other men of a certain age dressed the same, as happens, I think, oh, they look good. Just as those teenagers must have thought about each other’s fashion choices that morning.

You are what you wear, they say. And someone else is almost certainly wearing it, too.

MY WIFE hardly listens to a word I say these days. Perhaps that happens after 40 years. She’s has heard everything I have to say at least once.

And anyway it is all my fault. I bought her wireless headphones for Christmas. She wears them when painting, cooking, reading. I’ll start to say something and think, oh, she’s plugged into a story or music or someone talking about art.

Then again, I am wearing my headphones as I type, with the volume up. This is not about getting even, it’s just to hide from the noise.

You may have read about that fog alarm at Longships Lighthouse, just off the Cornish headland, going off every 13 seconds for a week.

According to a report in the Guardian, “Local people have been advised to invest in a set of earplugs while visitors heading to the tourist destination said they feared being kept awake at night.”

I feel for them all. The other half of our semi is being remodelled almost from the ground up, while a bungalow has also been built at the end of the garden. It’s been going on for months, and the noise can’t be helped, but these past few days it’s been deafening, drills screaming and battering, metal and wood being cut or sawed, hammers hammering.

With luck the new neighbours, when all is done, will be quiet. Then again, we’ve been so long without a neighbour, they might think we’re the noisy ones, especially with someone or other playing the guitar at all hours.

Are you a capital sort or inclined to a lower-case view of the world? A recent headline in the Guardian – The death of capital letters: why gen Z loves lowercase – suggests it could be to do with age.

Then again, it might just be fashion. These things come round again, like flared trousers and fascism.

Perhaps it’s also a reaction against the orange-hued unmentionable potty-mouth who rants in capital letters on his social media posts. But let’s proceed without further mention of the man who fancies himself to be an Elvis Costello album title. King of America, in case you’re wondering.

It’s easy to muddle these alphabetical generations, to forget who belongs where. Gen Z embraces people born between 1997 and 2012. On the young side to one who appeared in 1956. That makes me one of those boomers, the generation who snaffled all the opportunity and stole all the money, although someone forgot to tell my bank account about this.

I don’t have anything against lowercase letters as such, or against young people who see cultural merit in purging capitals from what they write.

But where’s the cultural merit in beating up on the older guys?

The other day a committee of MPs warned against the “ageist stereotyping” that slams my generation for stockpiling wealth while younger generations struggle. As it happens, that report also highlighted a worrying degree of digital exclusion among older generations. Thankfully, on that score, I am digitally enabled to complete distraction.

Anyway, upper and lowercase letters. Overuse of lowercase can lead to confusion, as capital letters guide the eye through a sentence like grammatical fingerposts. Then again, too many capitals spoil the view and obscure meaning.

My theory is that the eye skims over lowercase letters, then finds traction with the occasional capital letter. But I’m not going to shout about it or hit the caps key.

Thanks to Simon Garfield’s engaging typographical wander Just My Type (published in 2010) for the following advice in relation to emails: “CAPITAL LETTERS LOOK LIKE YOU HATE SOMEONE AND ARE SHOUTING.”

Same thing on social media. Whereas too many lowercase letters suggests morally superior mumbling.

Thanks to Garfield, too, for the reminder about how we ended up referring to upper and lowercase letters. It’s all to do with old-style printing.

“The term comes from the position of the loose metal or wooden letters laid in front of the traditional compositor’s hands before they were used to form a word – the commonly used ones on an accessible lower level, the capitals above them, waiting their turn.”

That is also where to ‘mind their ps and qs’ originates, as the letters were so alike when dismantled from a block of type that care had to be taken into which compartment of a tray they should be tossed.

Karim Salama, founder of the digital marketing firm e-innovate, told the Guardian that the trend for lowercase letters was a reflection of gen Z’s need for self-expression. Not sure they invented self-expression, but let’s not quibble, or get into inter-generational spats, as we should all agree to just get on.

Salama said: “Using lowercase is straightforward and free from the constraints of past generations.”

We all end up being the past generation sometime or other. Anyway it might also be an understandable reaction against the bellow world, that cruel cacophonous place where he – and it usually is a ‘he’ – who shouts loudest, who bullies and bashes, who belittles and demeans, who lies and libels, comes out on top.

Lovers of lowercase might just be the quiet mutineers of the day, rebels without a capital cause; or perhaps they’re just following the latest linguistic trend.

Either way, another way with words will be along soon enough.

Words from long ago still come to the surface with a pop.

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me…” has been doing that since A-level English and Shakespeare’s Richard II.

I was thinking about time when brushing my teeth the other morning. To be honest, I’ve spent more than is slated to remain, but we’ll return to that, once I’ve finished with this old electric toothbrush.

We are advised to brush twice a day, three minutes apiece. That’s six minutes a day. Multiply that by 365 and you are brushing for 2,190 minutes a year, nearly two days.

All for good for your teeth, but an impatient person might well think, six minutes, you want me to spend six minutes a day brushing my teeth. I am not that agitated by nature, but still. It’s funny how being told to put aside time for doing something beneficial can rattle your internal stopwatch.

The thing is, nobody ever tells you to devote so many minutes a day to reading newspapers or crime books, listening to music, playing the guitar. Happy would be such ‘wasted’ time.

This week there are also blood pressure readings to be sent to the doctors, morning and evening. Before each reading, you must sit still for five minutes. Five whole minutes of nothing! Those five minutes don’t exactly fly.

Mandated minutes never do.

As Oliver Burkeman points out in his book Four Thousand Weeks, Time And How To Use It, we tend to obsess about the to-do list, panic about those unread emails, while forgetting we are only here for a limited time. Four thousand weeks, on average, as Burkeman points out. Shockingly, that puts me somewhere around the 3,500 mark.

Time and how to use it has been on my mind, you see, as it is 525,600 minutes or so since I had that heart attack. A whole year. All those amassed minutes spent putting myself back together again. This has been achieved after a fashion. I am now as I was then, apart from a spot of coronary plumbing, and a fistful of tablets each day (now reduced in number by two).

The life you have is the one you’ve got. As a fit and active man, I was unlucky to have had a heart attack, perhaps; but lucky to have suffered nothing worse, and to be in decent enough nick again.

Afterwards it wasn’t so much the big things that mattered. Not the holidays, ambitions and bucket-lists, although a long holiday abroad would be lovely.

A heart attack turns you into a sentimental sort who opines that life is composed of friends and loved ones, companionable pints of beer, walks in the country, chatting on the marital sofa while watching television, the company of your grown-up children, the delight in watching your granddaughter grow.

Each day should with luck contain a cupful of joy, even when everything goes wrong, and a cold wind blows.

Here’s another quotation.

“Forever is composed of nows”.

It’s from a poem by Emily Dickinson. To be honest, I must have been through a few ‘nows’ as that one had slipped my mind. But there it is, in my university copy of The Complete Poems signed (by me, not Emily, sadly) and dated 1977.

Thinking that your life is made up of ‘nows’ is not a bad way to look at it. Now should be enough to keep us going, rather than ‘then’ and ‘if only’.